On December 1 2014, Dylanne Dearborn and Stephanie Orfano presented an open session for liaison librarians on ORCID, a persistent digital identifier that disambiguates researchers names. As an identification system, ORCID enables all aspects of a researcher’s work to be identified, while also allowing for linkage in the scholarly communications workflow.

The presentation introduced ORCID and detailed the potential benefits and uses for different stakeholder groups including researchers, university administrators, funding bodies, publishers, and the library. Examples of ORCID integration were introduced and the prospective role of ORCID in the scholarly communication process was discussed.

On December 9 2014, almost 50 library staff (and a sprinkling of CTSI staff) participated in the 2014 PD Day sponsored by the Instruction in Library Use (ILU) Committee. This year’s guest facilitator was Lori Mestre of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, who led participants through a series of presentations and exercises on how to more creatively and effectively reach students through online tutorials and learning objects.

The workshop will be followed in January and February by a series of follow-up learning sessions, coordinated by 3 librarians seconded to CTSI (Monique Flaccavento, Heather Buchansky and Mindy Thuna), to expand on the ideas and insights generated during the workshop.